3 Aug
2001
3 Aug
'01
9:43 a.m.
--- John Allain <allain(a)panix.com> wrote:
A buddy of mine I still see on a regular basis, hand-wrapped the frame-
buffer for the 11/780 at Cranston-Csuri, here in Columbus, late 1970s-
early 1980s. At one point, they were one of the premiere graphics
companies in the country. I know they did intros to Sunday sports shows
(if you ever saw a football morph into a basketball and sink on a rim-shot,
that was them) and they did some of the opening graphics (of the Huntington
Bank building, downtown) for "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", a cheesy low-
budget Canadian film starring Raul Julia before he was famous.
C-S died because they were charging outrageous fees per second of animation
and when Apollo and other workstations came along, it became cheaper for
their customers to buy the equipment _and_ staff it than it was to keep
paying C-S for their animations. They were the dinosaurs when the mammals
moved in. Neat toys, though.
-ethan
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All this talk
makes me wonder (and I know this question has been
answered before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they
use to do the computer graphics in movie Tron?
One company (there were at least three for Tron), MAGI, actually used an
IBM Mainframe programmed with punch cards (I don't know which framebuffer
they used). Not too exciting to watch being done. Remember, CG was and
still is made in non-real-time, only back then it was a little more
extreme. MAGI Synthavision was a real early bird. I remember seeing an
article for it in Popular Science in the 70's.